I love good guys

snowflake_challenge '25:- Share [a] favorite piece of original canon

One favorite is a single page of Marvel Team-up Annual #5 (1982) by Mark Gruenwald (script & "breakdowns"). It's available inside the Thing: The Serpent Crown Affair anthology, as well as digital and the original paper. None of the surrounding story is important to what this page accomplishes for the characters or how it clicked with my imagination (not in c.'82 when it somehow came into the household, possibly for a long car trip, but in c.'84 when I imprinted on it).

• Memory only:
  A bald man and a curly-haired woman in ordinary clothes, together in a dark, crowded movie theater, enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly, ghostly snakes writhe out of the screen! The woman gasps, recoils, stands, and heads down the row of seats. Only she sees the snakes. Concerned, the man follows her to the lobby, where the lights reveal that his skin is red -- literally, artificially, synthezoid red -- and he asks her if she's all right. As she tells him about the snakes and her suspicions, she gestures and transforms her ordinary clothes into a scarlet and magenta super-hero costume with a swirling cape and peaked headband. "I will come with you," he volunteers. "No," she puts her hand on his arm. "This is a job for the Scarlet Witch. You enjoy the movie. If I'm not back by dawn, gather the Avengers and come running!"


• Double-checking:
  It's one page + one facing panel. The costume transformation is unseen, elided with a "Soon, outside..." transition. And the final lines are actually: "The Scarlet Witch must find out why!" / "You do not want me to come with you?" / "No, my love -- your strength must be kept in reserve. If you do not hear from me within twenty-four hours, notify the Avengers and come running!"

That launched the Scarlet Witch as my favorite superhero. And it made Wanda and Vision not only one of my very few OTPs -- fight me, Marvel -- but an enduring image of a complementary, companionate relationship between healthy adults, as later dwelt on in Steve Englehart's The Vision and the Scarlet Witch Volume 2 limited series (1985-86), which is the basis of Wandavision, despite all the misuses and mischaracterizations since. (Mr. Byrne, you were wrong; Vision is not a toaster; Wanda is not mentally ill for loving him; how could you not see the metaphors? Or did you see and acted to veto?) (DC physically fridges its heroines. Marvel psychologically fridges them.)

Yes, I have wondered whether Jac Schaeffer (head writer of Wandavision; producer of Agatha All Along; sadly no longer attached to the upcoming Visionquest) also imprinted on that page or an equivalent in her own way, in her own time.

snowflake_challenge '25: A fannish opinion that changed over time

I'll share one opinion and one practice.

Changed opinion: Lacroix. Back when I was a fandom newbie and watching Forever Knight backward -- that is, from S3 in syndication, to Nth-gen S2 VHS tapes generous folks mailed me for the cost of materials and postage, to Nth-gen S1 VHS tapes from different generous folks -- and there were yet episodes that I had not seen, I... founded the Light Cousins and Faithfuls. Sorry! My ill-founded opinion at that time was that the Lacroix character could feasibly and usefully be approached as capable of reform, ideally through his feelings for other characters, especially Fleur and Nick. I was wrong. That's not a useful or supportable approach to the canon story structure or the character's role within it. Of course individual fan writers can and should create such stories as excellent fanfic! But for myself, I reject and disavow that approach. It is not my cup of Ribena. Lacroix is and should be a villain, both a metaphorical representation or mechanism of whatever real-world evil canon is grappling with that week and a practical plot lever to impede or inform Nick's long, hard road toward eventual heroic victory.

Changed practice: Disclaimers. While I always include endnotes on fanworks -- temporarily refraining in anonymous exchanges -- they've shortened greatly over the decades and, in my most recent three works, I've finally found a fully satisfactory substitute for the ancient "Disclaimer" opening. To back up, coming out of paper zine days, it was customary to state that TPTB owned the IP (and no profit was being made, etc.). (Few do that anymore. TPTB know what fanfic is now.) But that's only one of three reasons I've always been such an endnotes fiend. The second, you can guess: academia trained me to cite my sources and to feel anxiety about not doing so accurately and comprehensively. The third ... back in '96 -- two years before Google would be founded, when search was barely a function -- when I had shared all of 2 or 3 short fanfics on FKFic-L, and had given the original FTP Site archivist permission to host them, that was when a stranger who shared my wallet surname -- which was on those posts then because (a) I didn't yet know better and (b) my university, also not yet knowing better, used our wallet names as our email addresses -- searched up those stories and emailed me assuming that I believed in vampires for real and other upsetting things. Long story short, one lesson I took away was to clarify on fanfic that I know the difference between fiction and reality. I've continued all these years, through various boilerplate formulas. My newest, simplest, endnotes opener is: "I wrote this fanfic of [IP] in [Month / season / event]." I'm pleased with this approach. We'll see how it wears.

snowflake_challenge '25 #1: Update your fandom information.

I updated my profiles not too long ago, just in June, when I refurbished my journal's banner and default icon to feature Bradamante at dawn instead of Toronto at night. But there's always room for a polish! My DW profile remains a bit longer than my AO3 profile, because of the AO3's prudent word-count limit and my tendency to blither. ;-)

( Copy/pasted text of my DW profile bio )

( Copy/pasted list of interests from my DW profile )

Challenge #9: Rec your newest thing -- enthusiasm, obsession, fandom, earworm, etc.

Yesterday, I read an impressive Journey to the West AU fanfic, told from the dragon-horse's perspective, in which Monkey is mute. (This is a sober re-imagining, not the bonkers humor I often go for in JttW.) This change makes humanity (and Heaven) take him even less seriously (though Buddha treats him exactly the same). Removing his voice swallows his patter and boasts and exposes his foundational motivations in new, evocative ways. Killer final line. "Spring Unheard" by Idonquixote (T, gen, ~8K words).

A few days ago, I finished watching the five episodes of Echo, the latest MCU show on Disney+, the first officially under the "Marvel Spotlight" imprint for standalone, don't-need-to-know-canon, adult-aimed productions (Werewolf by Night belongs there, too, imo, if they're willing to relabel it). The title sequence -- theme song and graphics -- is absolutely fantastic, ten out of ten. ( Further opinion is a high-level spoiler )

I'm presently spacing out the final few episodes of season one of My Adventures with Superman because I don't want it to be over. This is my kind of Superman! A very good guy being good! This is a show that deeply understands why Superman must rescue the cat. The story is so clearly told by people who love the characters, and who change them only in ways that make them more essentially themselves for today's audience. I adore how they addressed and subverted certain tropes, like Lois finding out Clark is Superman. Fundamentally, this is a story where he is Clark to the bone, and Superman is just his work clothes, his "customer service voice," and I am there for that. (I think that the "my" in the title is Clark's.)

Challenge #3: Create a wish list of fandom things that you'd like to receive.

If you know where I can legitimately purchase a set of the fabled limited-edition Young Blades (TV, 2005) DVDs, please do let me know! I believe these exist because, first, there was a rumor soon after cancellation, and, second, Euro-length versions of the episodes were once loaded to YouTube. (They haven't been there in years; sorry.) I imagine that copies were given to people who had worked on the show and not actually sold to the public, or that there was a canceled run and the DVDs manufactured were mostly junked, but I don't know. I do have a copy of the Polish DVD squishing several episodes into a "movie" (which has a lovely Photoshopped cover photo, of a period army in front of a castle in bright sunshine, irreconcilable with the show's canon/budget ~grin~) (I do have an old region-unlocked DVD player because of the German FK season-one DVDs).

I sure would enjoy a dedicated fanwork event for D&DC or BSG78, coordinated by someone with reach into those fandoms! I'd also be enthusiastic for a generic event in the line of Oldschoolfic and Myoldfandom.

I hope we have another fanwork event in the line of Everywoman, Rarewomen, and Femme-fic again this year.

I wish that all of us here will find our fandom communities hospitable, joyful, comforting, respectful, inspiring, and safe, and that we uphold and spread that goodness as much as we can. ♥